


Heard 'Round the World

by Lisse



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, American Revolution, Gen, Hetalia Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-10
Updated: 2009-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-18 00:26:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2328566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>England listens to the cries over the ringing echo of the gunshot. He lifts his gaze from the figure sprawled on the ground and lowers his rifle.</p>
<p><i>Oh</i>, he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heard 'Round the World

It is difficult to kill a country with one bullet, but it isn't impossible – not as long as it’s the right bullet at the right time. Simply pointing a gun at them and pulling the trigger does no good, because the majority of them can shrug off and indeed _have_ shrugged off worse. Their flesh and blood and bones aren’t important, after all.

It’s their people’s _belief_ that matters.

Kill the belief – destroy the people’s hopes and dreams, tear the tapestry of ideas and history and self-identification that holds them together – and the country dies. Simple as that.

England listens to the cries over the ringing echo of the gunshot. He lifts his gaze from the figure sprawled on the ground and lowers his rifle.

_Oh_ , he thinks.

Behind the rebels’ eyes, something shatters like glass.

*

“That was overkill,” France says later, flippantly enough. “Don’t you think so?”

England glances up at him – sees the cracks forming in the other nation, hears the faintest echo of something that will, in hindsight, be _liberté_ and _egalité_ and _fraternité_. Long practice allows him to see the rage in France’s expression, however carefully hidden it’s supposed to be, and he remembers belatedly that America had other parents, too.

“You shouldn’t have supported him,” he says.

“You should mind your other colonies,” France says back, voice heavy with centuries of hostility. England hears, _Don’t you dare kill Canada_ , like they’re really parents and not something else entirely.

Sometimes they allow themselves to pretend to be normal.

Then the revolutions come.

*

This is the thing about America’s rebellion: it doesn’t go away.

Its army is shattered, to be sure. The colonists behind it turn on each other, each with their own idea about how to salvage this newest disaster, and England imprisons some and executes others and narrowly misses capturing the rest. But the rebellion itself doesn’t stop, even after the formal surrenders. It has taken on its own momentum over the years, a kind of mythology taking shape around it even as England picks it apart piece by piece, until the land itself whispers the stories to him.

And he is _used_ to rebellions. He has battled with his brothers and sister for longer than he cares to remember, watched Ireland and Scotland and Wales struggle time and again to take or keep their independence. He has fought his Caribbean colonies more often than he will ever admit and certainly treated them more harshly than he would ever have treated America.

Once, on a rare occasion when she isn’t plotting a revolution in the plantation fields or wiping blood away from her mouth and promising to fight him forever or telling him at gunpoint to get the hell of her island, he asks Jamaica what she would do if he shot her.

“What I always do,” she says, all anger and scars and _life_. “I’d get back up.”

*

No one will tell him where the body is – not the rebels, of course, and not France, supportive as he is of the scattered rebels for some reason or another and not even the loyal colonists, who take him into their homes and give him tea or supper and regard him with something that is just a little too pitying to be disdainful.

If he doesn’t know, they seem to say – if he is that terrible of a guardian – they certainly aren’t about to tell him.

They’re more English than the rest of the colonists, but that’s not enough anymore.

He thanks them and goes back to his soldiers and his ships and waits and waits and waits for the revolutionaries to finally realize they have nothing left to fight for – that it is quite impossible to have a revolution when the very thing they’re bleeding for is long dead, killed more by their moment of disbelief than by England’s gunshot.

But then he learns that Prussia’s men are still cheerfully attempting to fight on both sides at once, possibly just for the hell of it, and that Kosciuszko won’t go home even when Poland shows up to pout at him. He watches the Iroquois continue to shatter, although he doesn’t realize how deep the rifts run until Tuscarora attacks him and almost puts a bullet through his skull, not that that would have killed _him_.

France’s laughter has sharp edges when he tells England that if Lafayette wants to keep fighting with the colonists, that’s his own damn business.

It is fitting, England thinks – wholly appropriate – that even beyond the grave, America finds new ways to make his life miserable.

*

In 1789, France’s people stitch the tatters of a failed revolution together and make it their own.

After years of using scattered and persistent harassment – burned ships, stolen weapons, sneak attacks unworthy of what England considers proper fighting – the colonists take this as their cue to try again formally and in force.

This time some of the leaders are different. There is less formality and pretty politics and more ferocity, as if an extra decade’s worth of guerrilla warfare and simmering resentment have changed the entire nature of the revolution.

(Except it hasn’t changed at all, not when the words in the so-called declaration are exactly the same.)

*

Not quite ten years after England pulls the trigger, he finds himself on his knees in the dirt, staring up the barrel of a gun.

The boy who’s aiming it at him looks like America, but he’s not. There is something careful about him, with harder edges and a certain set to his jaw, and for all that the physical resemblance is absolutely uncanny, England can’t imagine _this_ boy small and knee-high, waiting at the docks to welcome him home.

All the same, he meets too-cautious eyes and says, “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Something flits across the boy’s face – not anger, just confusion - and his gaze darts to the soldiers around him. They’re not wearing uniforms, not any of them, and some of them are young and some of them are old and he’s pretty sure some of them have been borrowed from other nations, but there is something in their eyes that he suddenly, belatedly recognizes.

Flesh and blood don’t matter to his kind, just belief – and maybe belief, even if it momentarily lapses, can be strong enough to save a country beyond the brink of death.

America smiles in a lopsided way and lowers his rifle just a fraction. His voice isn’t exactly friendly or even as jovial as it was before England shot him – but it could be one day, after he’s sorted out what it is his colonists believe in.

“You’re supposed to be bigger,” he says back.

His soldiers are arrayed behind him like an honor guard - like the strange unwieldy beginnings of a people.

_I’m not the one you needed to shoot_ , he doesn’t have to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Someday someone will write about the Six Nations having stupid adventures. But in the meantime, here's a Tuscarora guest appearance.
> 
> Jamaica had more slave uprisings and rebellions than like the rest of the Caribbean put together.
> 
> _Liberté, égalité, fraternité_ = go go French Revolution!


End file.
